Shortstories

Hipster

My ‘hobby’ – if you could call it that – is to willingly give myself over to contagious mental automatisms. I collect mind-memes. As hobbies go this is rather an easy one – no great effort is required (actually no effort at all) and no special skills or specialist knowledge is needed. That makes it ridiculously easy, but I nevertheless still choose to regard it as a hobby. It’s easy because it all happens by itself! It’s like catching fleas – all you have to do is stand in the right place long enough and they will come and swarm all over you. They’ll climb up your legs and come and live on you. They’ll live in your ear. As anyone who as ever stood in a flea-pit will testify, you can’t keep the little buggers off! By jingo you can’t. No way.

The little varmints come running when they smell you there. They come from far and wide, like alcoholics when they hear of free booze, like crack-heads when they hear that you’re giving away crack for nothing. They come from miles. They hop and they skip and they jump all over you. That’s what it’s like when you actually want to voluntarily give yourself over to infectious mental automatisms. They don’t have to be asked twice. No sir they don’t. By jingo they don’t. Not by a long chalk. The little feckers come running. Belting along the road like Olympic sprinters. Breaking every speed limit in their hurry to avail of your awe-inspiring stupidity…

So automatisms are a bit like mind-fleas, I guess you could say. Psychic parasites. Vermin of the mind. They come and they swarm all over you. they run riot, they take you over. They multiply within you like – well – like vermin I guess you could say. The intriguing thing about mental automatisms is however that they disguise themselves. They camouflage themselves (at least at first, in the early stages of the infection) as something useful, something viable. Something that has an actual purpose in being there. It could be anything – a look, a mannerism, a tone of voice, a particular word or phrase that gets used over and over again, anything like that. It could also be an opinion, which is what you could call a higher order automatism. Opinions generally seem useful and viable. At least, they do if you happen to subscribe to them! If you don’t subscribe to the opinion in question then of course it won’t seem so viable – it will in all probability seem annoying stupid, it will seem irritatingly and offensively dumb…

That’s how opinions disguise themselves, you see. When you get infected with an opinion it straightaway tricks you into agreeing with you, into seeing things its way. Then it doesn’t seem annoyingly dumb and offensively stupid. On the contrary, it gets to seem useful, viable. It actually gets to seem vitally important – indispensible, even. We prize our stupid, squalid little opinions, not realizing that they are in fact psychic parasites, mere unconscious automatisms. We trot them out at every available opportunity – we never get tired of reiterating them. And every time we give vent to them we get a real kick out of it. We get a right good dose of satisfaction from coming out with it, just as if we were voicing a priceless gem of wisdom, capable of illuminating the darkness of the general all-pervading ignorance like a magnesium flare. We feel that we are the source of some kind sublime insight. We even surprise ourselves with our brilliance.

We get to feel that it is OUR indisputable and irrepressible genius that is doing the illuminating. It is as if we feel that we should be given some kind of prize, for God’s sake. Can you believe that? How funny it this? How freakishly bizarre is this? How ridiculous is this? This is how the psychic parasites make a mockery of us. And it works every time. What total knobs we must be! This is how the viral opinions exploit us. They dumb us down to the point that we not only feel that the opinion in question is right and meaningful and valuable to the world, we feel that it is a veritable stroke of genius!We think this every time we come out with it. voicing these pernicious automatisms, these malignant viral opinions bizarrely enables us to feel good about ourselves , even though we are being made comlete twats of. It’s bloody hilarious, it really is. It’s enough to make you piss yourself laughing. If it wasn’t so bloody tragic at the same time, that is. These invasive mental automatisms turn our lives into tragicomedies – although we can’t see it. We can’t see it because we’re so damn dumb. Because the automatisms have made us so damn dumb. Because it suits their purposes to do so. Far from seeing the comedy (seeing what twats we are, that is), we take ourselves with the utmost seriousness. We become ludicrously solemn and pompously self-important as we involuntarily voice the viral opinions, ridiculous plonkers that we are!

More advanced mental automatisms are called beliefs. Oh God – how seriously we take our beliefs! We couldn’t take them more seriously, we really couldn’t. We’re such colossal dicks. We get real nasty about them. The belief in question – like an opinion – tricks us into agreeing with it. It tricks us into seeing things its way – then it gets to seem viable, important, indispensible. It tricks us by making us completely stupid, awesomely stupid, indefatigably stupid, and then – when it has done this to us – it flatters us by facilitating us in feeling that we are specially clever to have it, to have the wretched moronic belief. Even though in reality it has us, and not the other way around. It facilitates us in feeling good about ourselves. Absurdly so. Ridiculously so. Laughably so. I really can’t get across how much all this sickens me…

I know. You’re wondering why – if it sickens me as much as I say it does – do I make a point of letting these vile mental automatisms infect me. Deliberately exposing myself to their corrupting influence, as I do. Making a twat of myself. The difference is of course that I’m doing it consciously. I’m being ironic. It’s an exercise in irony. It’s dada. It’s art. I’m a kind of a hipster – a memester, I suppose you could say.